Woody Allen's unofficial London murder trilogy (it began with the thriller Match Point and continued with the detective story Scoop) concludes with an (a)morality tale of sorts.

A pair of brothers — go-getting social climber Ewan McGregor and go-along alcoholic Colin Farrell — agree to kill a man their rich uncle needs rubbed out. Why the uncle would entrust the job to two ineffectual kids with no apparent aptitude for skulduggery isn't clear. But he does, and there follows a tale of nerves, self-doubt, guilt and comeuppance. The story's decently compelling, the acting stylized (wait 'til you hear Farrell's on-again-off-again Cockney accent) if never terribly believable.

It's never hard to sit through, even if Allen (who wrote and directed, but does not appear), ends the tale too abruptly. The final frames come so soon after the dramatic climax, in fact, that you might think he simply lost the last five pages of the script.

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